Fleas in the homestead

Fleas!  Yup we’ve got ‘em.  We discovered about a week after moving in that one of the rooms in our house had a flea problem.  And it wasn’t from our dogs, they seem fine and they aren’t allowed in the bedrooms.  I gave them each a good bath though, just to be safe.

So what do you do, especially if you ‘re a hippie like us and refuse to use those highly effective but dangerous aerosol flea bombs?  For the record, a friend who spent some time working at the CDC told us the flea bombs are very dangerous and that young children have died from being exposed to the powder that comes from them.

There are a few ways of dealing with this naturally.

Vacuuming – Courtney read that fleas are activated and hatch when they sense heat and vibrations.  Since we moved in, we’ve kept the thermostat higher than it was while the house was vacant, and simply being in those rooms probably causes enough vibration to bring the fleas out of their eggs.  A vacuum cleaner causes plenty of vibration.  Running that baby today will cause a large hatch over the next few days.  So the idea is to vacuum every day for 21 to 30 days or so and you will capture the entire life cycle of the fleas and then be flea free.

That seemed like a lot of work to us.

Then we learned about borax.  Sprinkling borax around the edges of your room(s) will kill the fleas in any stage of life.  Let it sit for a day and then vacuum it up and you should be rid of them.  We did that and let it sit for four days.

Diatomaceous earth is another chemical free option, but it must be combined with vacuuming and be reapplied after each vacuum session.  The diatomaceous earth is a powder with very sharp edges and cuts the fleas as they move past it and then they die.  It would be the equivalent to us humans of taking a bunch of broken glass and spreading it all over the floor and having to walk barefoot.  I also spread diatomaceous earth everywhere along with the borax.

We’ve done the final vacuuming and moved the furniture back into that room.  Neither Courtney nor I have seen any signs of fleas in the past week, so we count this treatment as a success and give it our highest recommendation.

Thanks, Robert.

Breaking in a new garden

Yesterday in my rototiller post I mentioned that we are installing a new garden in an area that once was an old horse pasture.  It is also next to the area where the leach field is for our newly installed septic system.  The system was installed only few weeks before we moved in to the new house.  There were a couple of snows during that time period, which meant the large backhoe loader was driving around on moist soil and providing immense compaction.

It is easy to tell where the loader was driving, because the rototiller cannot till those areas.  Along the fence is easy tilling, but the path where the loader drove is tough.  The tiller just scalps at the surface of the ground and pulls me along.  I’m having to resort to using my shovel to dig this ground up by hand.

It looks like a lot of work, and it is, but it really is quite enjoyable.  I call it my country-boy’s gym membership.

Another important point to mention has to do with the blade of the shovel.  I’ve read many times in gardening books that sharp tools make a big difference.  I took my angle grinder to that shovel and put a sharp edge on it and boy did things get easier.  I couldn’t believe it.  And to think about all those years of my youth, digging with a dull shovel!

Thanks, Robert.

The Troybilt Pony Rototiller

I recently purchased a used Troybilt Pony Rototiller that I found on Craigslist.  We wanted a tiller because we’re currently planning a garden around 2500 square feet, as well as a greenhouse with earth beds and also a few separate and permanent beds for things like asparagus. The site where these beds will be located is currently a hard packed horse pasture.  I’ll need to incorporate as much manure, compost and other material as I can so the garden has a good start.

I’m following in my father’s footsteps again on this one.  When I was younger in the 1980s we had a Troybilt Pony.  The thing is absolutely unstoppable and is perfect for a garden of this scale.  The machine I found was in great condition and was a little older.  This is preferred because I’ve read that the newer models in more recent years leave much to be desired in terms of manufacturing quality.  Just as in about anything, they don’t make ‘em like they used to.  That’s why I’m glad to have found an older model.

Eventually I’d like to build the soil up to the point where lots of tilling isn’t needed, but that’ll take several years.  I do have my eye on one of these babies, though, for some time in the future.

Thanks, Robert.

Back up heat sources

In October 2011 our area was hit by a very large and early snowstorm.  This wet snow stuck to everything and was particularly destructive because most of the trees had still not lost all their leaves.  Branches fell on power lines causing widespread power outages (for three or more days in some instances), but luckily we were spared.

This event got me thinking about heating our home in the winter if we had no electricity for our forced air furnace.  The main motivator was that our new baby girl was less than two months old.  We purchased a kero-sun heater from Lowe’s and a few spare fuel cans.  The thing works great and I have enough fuel for several days of back up heating.

Now, I’ve one-upped myself.  I found an old cast iron wood stove on Craigslist.  It is a Vermont Castings Vigilant which was assembled and test fired on September 25, 1980.  This is the same exact stove that my father had in our house growing up and so I was very comfortable in this purchase.  A quick call to my uncle revealed that he also had the same one and said that this stove was the best one on the market for a very long time.

I’ve read online that there are lots of people that have used the Vigilant for their primary heat source for 30 years.  The owner of this stove had it sitting in their garage for the last ten years and considered it a nuisance, thought it smelled bad and was glad to part with it for the very low price of $180.  For reference, new stoves today are in the $1500 to $3000 range.

Can’t wait to install it and test it out.

Thanks, Robert.

News Alert: We’ve got our homestead!

Time for a big announcement: we’re northern Colorado landowners!  We’ve been very patient and been praying for our own little place and we’ve found it.  This cute little 1946 home comes with a little over one acre of flat land out in the country in a prime agricultural area.

Our blog won’t be as active for the next week or so as we get settled in, but we’ll be back to share more of our adventure with you.

Thanks, Robert.

How to cook a pumpkin

Thanks Robert for that update on the storage potential of winter squash.  Now I bet you want to know how to cook them.  I personally like to roast them and make pumpkin pie healthy food for my family.  Here’s how I roast them.  It’s pretty easy and requires no monitoring, so you can go about your other chores.  You can roast pumpkins or any winter squash this way.

First, preheat oven to 350°F.  Now, cut them in half.  Be careful, they can be very hard, which makes cutting a little dangerous.

Next, scoop out the seeds.  (You can roast the seeds later if you’d like)

Now pop them in a roasting pan, cut side down, like so.

And finally add some water to the bottom of the pan, maybe a cup or less.  It depends on the size of the pan and how many you are roasting.  Mine has a groove along the outer edge so I like to add a little more because I know the pumpkins won’t be sitting in the water.  Cover with aluminum foil tightly and  roast for 45 minutes to  1 1/2 hours.  Until they are tender when you push them with your finger.  If they aren’t done, it makes them tougher to scoop out and the pulp is often more stringy and fibrous.

Here is butternut squash, acorn squash and sweet dumplings.

Before:

After:

Voila!

Here’s a link to a really yummy Thai coconut curry soup from Weight Watcher’s that uses butternut squash but I think you could substitute any winter squash.

Please share a link to your favorite squash recipes in the comments section.

Thanks,  Courtney

Storing winter squash

We’ve still got quite the supply of pie pumpkins and butternut squash.  We love them both very much and started the winter off with a vanload.  See the picture from Courtney’s post a month ago.

Storing them was easy.  We brought them home from our friend’s house and cleaned them up with a wet rag and a bucket of water.  I let them dry in the garage overnight, because I didn’t want excess water soaking in to the top of our kitchen cabinets.  The next day we arranged them on top of the cabinets.  Done.  I didn’t do anything else to them.  I’ve read that it might be a good idea to dip them in a clorox/water solution as a way of preventing mold, etc but I didn’t do that.

I wondered how long they would keep.  Now I know it is about five months.  At the beginning of February I went through and inspected each one.  There were two or three that were getting soft and a few more that were developing a small amount of white fuzzy mold at the bottom.  All of those were thrown away.  That was a tough one for me, because you all know that I don’t like to throw things away.  Having a food scientist for a wife helps keep the gray areas of what is acceptable to eat or not well defined and very narrow.  I was tempted at first to simply cut out the bad spots and cook the rest as a way to salvage the pumpkin.  Courtney says “no” because fungi usually have very extensive root systems, meaning that if we see a little surface mold then the flesh of the pumpkin is likely full of mold roots.  As an interesting side note, see this Wikipedia article on the 2200 acre fungus patch in Oregon.

Today I see that there are a few more showing signs of wear, so we’ll have to do another wave of winnowing.  It is probably time to bake the last of them and freeze as much as we can.

Here’s a picture of a good one and a bad one.  Its pretty easy to tell them apart.

I should also mention, though, that the butternuts keep much longer.  We only threw one away so far and it was because the skin was scraped and therefore weakened.  They are good keepers.

Thanks, Robert.